This invention relates generally to presenting content via advertising systems, and more specifically to tracking monetary performance of the presented content.
An advertising (“ad”) system, such as an online or social networking system, allows its users to connect to and communicate with other ad system users. Users may create profiles on an ad system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of ad systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by ad systems, an ad system provides an ideal forum for entities to increase awareness about products or services by presenting content items to ad system users.
Presenting content items to ad system users allows an entity to gain public attention for products or services or to persuade users to take an action regarding the entity's products or services. Additionally, many ad systems generate revenue by displaying certain content items to their users. Frequently, ad systems charge entities for each presentation of certain types of content items to an ad system user (e.g., each “impression” for the certain types of content items) or for each interaction with or related to certain types of content items by an ad system user (e.g., each “click” or each “conversion”). Entities being charged for presentation of content items associated with their campaigns oftentimes cannot track performance of their content items while they are being charged. Therefore, even though content items from the ad campaign are being presented and entities will know if a budget for presenting the content items in their campaigns has been spent, entities do not know how their content items perform on a pre-impression basis while the budget is being spent and how often they may be overpaying for impressions.